Grief
by Laura W
Summary: Chakotay has to let someone go. It isn't easy.


**GRIEF**

* * *

_November 1996_

_From Chakotay's personal logs. This story was written for a multiple author project in which the overarching story was about Janeway's apparent disappearance, assumed death, and eventual return to the ship. Each author claimed a character, more or less, and wrote the same story (or a part of it) from that character's point of view. Unfortunately, I can no longer find the other authors' stories. Trust me, they were all fantastic._

**GRIEF  
by **Laura Williams

1.

I am in someone's nightmare.

Living it. This isn't really happening to me, it's happening in someone else's mind. I'm trapped here. Forced to take a role in this play, to say things and do things....

But it isn't me. I heard a voice give an order to leave, and it sounded like my voice, but they weren't my words. I would never have given that order. But this is the way the nightmare goes -- we'll leave, leave her behind. Leave her behind.

When we get far enough away, the nightmare will end. She'll come back. She never really left. Did she?

Would she?

No. She wouldn't. She promised.

This is only a nightmare.

I wish I could wake up.

2.

My feet are always cold now.

Sometimes on the bridge my hands and face go numb. They tingle at first, and I hear a buzzing in my ears, and then numbness. It goes away.

But my feet. It doesn't matter how many pairs of socks I put on, or how many times I raise the temperature in the room. My feet are always cold. I can't feel them. Can't feel anything.

3.

I wander the ship at night when it's quiet, when the lights are low and no one watches me. I get tired of them watching me.

I run my fingers along the walls, the way she used to. Never during the day -- it would have been wrong for her to show this passion for her ship, to caress it like this. But she did it at night. I saw her do it a dozen times, a little smile on her face. It made me shiver to watch her.

I can connect with the ship. Its spirit is strong. It misses her.

4.

When I sleep, I sleep in her quarters.

In my own quarters I lie awake, thinking, trying to meditate. I can't concentrate there. I can't concentrate anywhere, not even on the bridge. I forget things. I start to give orders and leave them unfinished -- like the half dozen sand paintings in my room. I call crewmen into the Ready Room and forget why I wanted to talk to them. It doesn't matter anyway.

But in her quarters I don't have to concentrate. I don't have to think or remember anything. I just listen. I can hear her laughing.

The laughing puts me to sleep.

5.

They hauled me in for a physical today. Kes and the Doctor. It was so humiliating I didn't even tell them nothing was wrong with me. They wouldn't have listened.

The Doctor gave me something he said would calm my emotions. My emotions are fine. I don't need calming.

Kes says I've lost weight. I forget to eat while I'm working. I'm not hungry anyway.

Just tired. I wish I could lie down and sleep. Sleep forever.

6.

Tuvok is wrong.

He's been wrong about a lot of things in the past, but not like this. This ship only has one Captain. I won't sit in her chair, I won't work at her desk, and I sure as hell won't answer to her title. Why can't he accept it without having to change everything? Why does he keep asking me to pack up the things in her quarters? Why can't we leave her rooms the way they were? Does it really matter?

He keeps trying to talk about her, but I won't listen. He says he's only trying to help me, but I know better. I'm not the one who needs help. I would never have expected it from a Vulcan, especially not from Tuvok, with his logic and emotional detatchment.

He's in denial.

7.

I don't understand what's happening to me.

I almost hit B'Elanna today. She dragged me to the Holodeck to play hoverball. I didn't want to go, but Kes told her I needed the exercise. She wouldn't leave me alone so I finally went, just so she would stop hounding me.

I was losing. I argued with her over a ball I thought was out but she swore was in. We started screaming at each other. I was shaking, I don't know what I was saying, and then I was pulling back my fist to hit her.

She stopped me. There are only a handful of people on this ship who can do that, or who could do that before...before the accident. B'Elanna was always one of them, but this time she put me down so easily... I was weak. I don't remember falling, but I have the bruises to remind me.

I was still screaming when I hit the floor. But not about hoverball. I was screaming about...about Kathryn. At her, maybe. Her name, over and over -- Kathryn, Kathryn.

B'Elanna sat down with her back against the wall, watching me. She reached out but I moved away. And I couldn't stop screaming. Couldn't stop shaking or crying. It scared B'Elanna. It scared me. I'm still shaking.

I think... I think maybe I need help.

8.

Kes told me I should listen to my logs for the past few weeks.

I don't recognize that man's voice. It's confusing -- it sounds like me, but I don't remember saying those things. She played a recording of the memorial service for me, but I don't really remember that, either. Not the words, anyway. I remember the faces, the way they looked at me, Tom's eyes when he started to cry and turned away so I wouldn't see. Harry's shoulders shaking when he put his face in his hands.

If we had recovered a piece of the shuttlecraft, maybe this wouldn't be so hard. If I had been able to see her body one last time, just long enough to perform a ritual of passage. Even just to say goodbye.

But it's so hard to accept without proof.

9.

I know it was real now.

I sat with B'Elanna in the shuttlecraft today, re-creating the accident. B'Elanna talked me through it while I sat at the controls trying to imagine what she must have seen and heard and felt. I performed every action she would have, commanded the computer to divert all power to the structural integrity field when the hull started to rip itself apart.

I could see it then, could see it all -- the plasma storm, the swirling currents of energy. I closed my eyes and imagined her looking into her death. Did she know she was going to die? Was she afraid?

B'Elanna reminded me that she is -- was -- a very task-oriented person, more than me. She was probably so focused on trying to stay alive that she didn't know how near death she was, didn't have time to feel any remorse or any regrets.

B'Elanna went on duty and left me there in the shuttlecraft to think. So quiet. Like a tomb.

I fell asleep with my head on the control panel. I woke up screaming, waking up from a nightmare that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

10.

I've never known pain like this.

I've been tortured at Cardassian and Kazon hands, but the wounds I suffered then were nothing like this. A physical wound would either heal or kill me. This one won't kill me, though I wish it might, and I don't think it will ever heal.

But there's a physical dimension to it, too, like a missing limb. Something ripped from my body that I know I'll never get back, but I keep reaching for it anyway.

It happens at night. Almost every night I reach for her, expecting her to be there. She's not there. It hurts all over, like nothing I've ever felt before. There's no part of my mind I can retreat to to escape this pain.

I almost miss the numbness.

11.

"Crippling grief," Kes calls it.

Grief is a process, she says, with stages and passages. It catches us when we are weak and makes us even more vulnerable to wounds we have suffered in the past, losses we have endured silently. Each person has a different way of handling loss, and sometimes different ways of handling different losses.

When my father died, I was far away. I performed all the tribal rituals my mother wanted, I said the words and acted out the part. I pushed my grief, my guilt, into the corner of my mind where it slowly turned to rage. An emotion I could deal with, I could understand. I ran away and joined the Maquis, where I could release my rage.

This is different. This is worse. I can't run away because there is nowhere to go, not here in the Delta Quadrant. I've tried to push away the guilt and the grief, but it's making me sick. And there is no rage this time.

Crippling grief turns love to despair. It's cruel.

12.

The future terrifies me.

I've never been one to plan ahead. I live day to day, always in the present, with a strong sense of connection to the past. I have always lived for the sake of the moment, this moment.

I can't do that anymore. It's my responsibility to think of the future now, to consider the consequences of all our actions. It's so hard. It was always her job. I'm not prepared to plan ahead when every day it's a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning..

How did she do it? Was she really that strong, or am I simply a coward?

13.

"Seek wisdom," my father taught me. "Before you seek wisdom in yourself, you must first seek it in others."

Here on the Voyager, there aren't too many others to seek wisdom in, and the wisest person I've ever known is gone now. Gone. It's still hard to think about.

I've apologized to Tuvok, and started to let him talk about Kathryn. Funny, he probably knows her better than I do. Than I did. His stories are easy to listen to. He makes no judgements, offers no interpretations, forces no conclusions. He just tells and I just listen. We remember her this way. There is wisdom in Tuvok, though sometimes it's hard to find.

Kes comes to her quarters late at night and we talk. The remembering I do with Kes is different. Joyful. She returns to me the gentleness I thought I'd lost. The wisdom in Kes is easy to find. It's in her eyes, and in her smile.

It may be a long time before I find wisdom in myself again.

14.

Days pass. Nights.

They tell me again and again that time will heal me. How much time will it take? How much more of this do I have to endure before it gets any better?

Do I even want it to get better? Will it mean I've started to forget her? I never want to forget her. I won't forget her.

But sometimes I can't breathe. I start to feel a little better, I start to relax and live again, and then it all comes back to me. It's worst then, when I've forgotten for a second then remembered suddenly. It closes in on my chest until I can't breathe and I start sobbing again. I don't want to forget her, but I can't go on like this.

At night... At night I miss her touch. Not just her skin on mine, but the way she touched my spirit. I cry myself to sleep thinking about it, night after night.

Oh Kathryn...

My spirit is broken. I need you to heal it. But you are gone and my soul is drifting, drifting. Soon it will drift away.

15.

I can't stop shaking.

I had expected a casket to materialize on the platform with the Talaxians. I was ready for it, for the proof I needed. B'Elanna started the sequence and I turned away, listening to the whine of transport in progress, prepared to face whatever they would bring me, willing to accept her home. Finally, finally.

I looked back halfway through the sequence. An upright column of energy. Upright. Slender, strong like a reed at the sea's edge, but willing to bend in the sea breezes. That shape... I know that shape...

Oh no... No... What have I done?

B'Elanna and Tuvok tell me I stumbled forward, collapsed sobbing into her arms. I don't remember that. I don't remember B'Elanna leaving the room, or the conversation Tuvok had with Kathryn while I cried. I only remember being in her arms, her tears on my face, her slender, strong body holding mine up.

"You came back, Kathryn," I said. Said it again and again. "You came back. You came back." And then her name, a cry of disbelief at first, then calming, quieting, a whispered prayer.

And the shaking, shaking. I can't stop shaking. But it's all right now. I know what it is. It's my heart beating again.


End file.
